Article from November 2 Issue of Nation's Cities Weekly, Official Publication of the National League of Cities:
 

Retrofitting Suburbia Means Rediscovering the People

Nation's Cities, Nov 2

by Douglas Athas
 
When big cities came to be recognized as congested, dirty and unhealthy, the car came to the rescue. It carried city workers to the real-life scenes of “Leave It to Beaver” in suburban households across the country — and then carried the workers back to the city for their daily jobs. To Frank Lloyd Wright, the vision of the “horizontal city” included freestanding homes on individual plots and taking advantage of new technology — the automobile — to make better use of America’s abundant lands, says Anthony Flint in his new book, “Wrestling with Moses.” It was an attitude and philosophy shared by virtually all the modernist architects and architecture schools of the day.
 
Suburban city planners followed the lead and wrote ordinances that mandated the horizontal city, including: separated uses; height limits; one main structure per lot; separation between structures; and plenty of room for those cars. The shiny new construction in the suburbs was a pleasant contrast to the aging infrastructure in the core city. However, as the cities developed their remaining open areas and developed massive urban renewal projects, they too adapted the suburban modernism.
 
When Jane Jacobs, the journalist and author who questioned the sterile concepts behind the modernist designs, and who is the subject of Flint’s book, visited an early urban renewal project in downtown Philadelphia for “Architectural Forum” magazine, she reported that she was first taken to a street where “loads of people were hanging around on the street, on the stoops, having a good time of it.” She was told, “This is the next street we’re going to get rid of.” Then she saw a street that had been “fixed up,” that had been renewed, with one bored boy kicking a tire in the gutter. She turned to her host and asked, “Where are the people?”
 
Some 50 years later, when gasoline for the cars necessary to live the suburban lifestyle hit $4 per gallon last year, many commuters sitting in congested traffic and families chauffeuring their children to school and soccer practice and the mall felt trapped by the same cars that had once promised freedom. Aging suburban cities, especially first tier cities, are finding it more and more difficult to afford the massive infrastructure and services necessary to accommodate those thinly spread homes and businesses.
 
Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson call this the “suburban form” in their recent book, “Retrofitting Suburbia, Urban Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs.” They partially define the suburban form as isolated buildings, single uses, auto-dependence, low density, and streets and roads that branch out and often end in cul-de-sacs.
 
In an all-morning session in early October, Williamson met with city council members, planning and zoning commissioners, and staff members from Garland, Plano and Richardson — all first-tier suburbs of Dallas — to discuss the lessons learned and the case studies in “Retrofitting Suburbia.” She identified the economic and ecological challenges facing the post-war suburbs, such as the increase in vehicle miles traveled per capita that had been rising steadily for years until that $4 wall.
 
Participants learned that the demographic shift as boomers age will be a nationwide challenge. Households with children are declining. By 2030, 72 to 85 percent of new households will have no children. Further clouding the picture for suburbs, among the younger generations, 77 percent want to live in an urban core while 75 percent of the retiring boomers want mixed-age and mixed-use communities.
 
If it were all in the right place, there is currently enough large-lot, single-family housing to meet demand until 2025. Complicating the picture further, by 2015, there will be 2.8 million acres of greyfields and asphalt in the suburbs.
 

Villa Italia Mall in Lakewood, Colorado, was once described as the largest mall west of the Mississippi. Today it has been razed and has been renamed Belmar, the 23 urban-scaled streets and blocks that are the new downtown that Lakewood never had.

To meet the coming market demands from those empty-nesters and consumers downscaling, we are seeing more investment in places that are walkable and have a mixture of uses. Such locations have less traffic and fewer car trips per capita. They enjoy a healthier lifestyle. Property values are higher, which is good for investors and cities dependent on ad valorem taxes. Potential sites for retrofitting are strip corridors, vacant big box stores, dying regional shopping malls, industrial parks, and office parks. She showed examples from the book of retrofits, including Camino Nuevo Elementary in Los Angeles, MetroWest in Vienna, Va., and Englewood City Center near Denver. In the Denver area, seven of 13 regional malls have been retrofitted in some manner.
 
There will be some social adjustment to these changes though. Suburbanites understand that when they are in an enclosed mall that they are in a private space. However, as new town centers and open air malls are introduced, visitors feel when they are outdoors, that they are in a public place even though legally the space is privately owned. They intuitively feel they have public liberties. Silver Spring, Md., was the scene of a protest when a photographer in an open space was told he could not take pictures, that it violated company policy.
 
Villa Italia in Lakewood, Colo., another Denver suburb, was an enclosed mall on a 104-acre site that was once a thriving mass of stores plopped in the middle of a sea of parking. Its decline followed the same steep path as have so many other enclosed malls across the country. The city chose to forego proposals to build big box stores in favor of a sustainable, new urbanist model. Now named Belmar, the 23 urban-scaled streets and blocks are the new downtown that Lakewood never had. Belmar is a mixed-use, walkable destination with shopping, residences, offices and civic uses. The authors note that new buildings are LEED certified, site drainage is carefully handled, demolition materials are recycled, a 1.8-megawatt rooftop solar array is in construction, and there is even a wind farm in one parking lot.
 
Dunham-Jones is an associate professor and the director of the architecture program at Georgia Institute of Technology and Williamson is an associate professor of architecture at The City College of New York/CUNY.
 
Fifty years ago Jane Jacobs asked, “Where are the people?” Dunham-Jones and Williamson show that a new transformation has started that features designs for people rather than cars. Jacobs would be pleased.
 
Details: Athas is vice chair of NLC's First Tier Suburbs Council and can be reached at DAthas@ci.garland.tx.us. To learn more about NLC’s First Tier Suburbs Council, contact Christiana McFarland at mcfarland@nlc.org or visit http://www.nlc.org/inside_nlc/committees___councils/465.aspx.
 
Douglas Athas is a city council member in Garland, Texas.
 

 
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Comments:

Comment from: Richard Bach [Visitor]

I am glad to see you post on smart growth. A smart growth blog I like is Kaid Benfield's Blog.
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/

Kaid is:
Co-founder, LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system; co-founder, Smart Growth America coalition; author, Once There Were Greenfields (NRDC 1999), Solving Sprawl (Island Press 2001), Smart Growth In a Changing World (APA Planners Press 2007), Green Community (APA Planners Press 2009); voted one of the "top urban thinkers" in 2009 poll on Planetizen.com.

11/03/09 @ 21:10

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